It is unsurprising that Senator Barack Obama is not getting any love from Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle. She is a Republican. Lingle also happens to be the first Jewish governor of a state that has produced the nation's first black major party nominee and possibly its first black president. But don't let the fact that Obama was born and raised in Hawaii fool you! While campaigning for John McCain on "the mainland," as they call it in Lingle's (and Obama's?) Hawaii and Sarah Palin's Alaska, Lingle suggested that Obama is an impostor:
"Senator Obama likes to say he's from Hawaii. But, the truth is, I've never met him in my life. He's never called me on the phone. Ninety-five percent of the people in my state had never heard of him before he ran for president."
If only Obama had given Lingle a ring, perhaps he could have bolstered his Hawaiian credentials. Paul Theroux gives Lingle a taste of her own medicine in a piece for Tina Brown's new website, The Daily Beast:
She was born Linda Cutter in St. Louis, Missouri in 1953. In the mid-sixties she moved to California with her family and went to school there, graduated from Birmingham High School in Lake Balboa, California, then got a journalism degree from Cal State, Northridge. She married Mr. Lingle in 1972. She divorced him in 1975, around the time she left for Hawaii, where her father had relocated, and where her uncle had a car dealership ("Cars Cost less at Cutter! Ten Locations! Thousands of Vehicles!"). At some point she became a Republican. She married Mr. Crockett, lived for a while on the island of Molokai, then divorced Mr. Crockett, but keeping the Lingle name, entered politics. I rehearse these facts with her Mainland dossier because she is casting doubt on Obama's Hawaii connections and even his integrity. Obama was born here, which makes him a keiki o ka "aina‚ a child of the land, something she is not.
I was introduced to Gov. Lingle at a political event not long after her reelection by a friend who insistently repeated my name. When the governor looked blank, my friend said, "The writer! He writes books!" She said, "I don't have a lot of free time for reading," and moved on.
Governor, may I suggest Dreams From My Father, in which Obama proves that he really is from Hawaii. And, oh, how do you say chutzpah in Hawaiian?
